FILE- In this Dec. 9, 2009 file courtroom drawing shows David Coleman Headley before U.S. District Judge on charges that accuse him of conspiring in the deadly 2008 terrorist attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai and of planning to launch an armed assault on a Danish newspaper.Verna Sadock
He was the terrorists' secret weapon: David Coleman Headley, a middle-aged white American who told a Chicago court he laid the groundwork for one of the most spectacular Islamist terrorist attacks in recent memory.
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The admissions were made as part of a plea agreement that brought U.S. prosecutors one of the most significant convictions since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, with Mr. Headley agreeing to testify against his Canadian co-accused in exchange for being spared any U.S. death penalty or a future extradition to India.
Watch a Channel 4 documentary, which features excerpts from intercepted phone calls among the Mumbai attackers.
He still faces up to life in prison. The 49-year-old Pakistani-American admits that he has the blood of more than 160 people on his hands, asserting that, thanks to a cover story provided by his alleged Canadian accomplice, he played a key scouting role that led to the indiscriminate carnage of the 2008 Mumbai massacre.
For three days beginning on Nov. 26 of that year, a team of 10 Pakistani gunmen rained bullets and grenades upon soft targets in India's largest city, killing civilians, storming a synagogue, and setting luxury hotels ablaze. Their higher-ups, who coached them via telephone, told the gunmen the attack would assure them paradise.
None of this bloodletting would have happened save for information and videotapes on the targets that Mr. Headley first supplied to Pakistan-based terror group responsible for the conspiracy: Lashkar-e-Taiba.
"Are you pleading guilty because you plotted to bomb and maim people?" U.S. District Court Judge Harry Leinenweber asked in a series of rapid-fire questions put to Mr. Headley during the change-of-plea hearing. The judge went line-by-line through the charges in the 12-count indictment as the accused rescinded his not-guilty pleas.
"David Headley, is that what you like to go by?" the judge asked.
Born to a Pakistani father and an American mother and raised in both countries, the bicultural terrorist was, until a few years ago, known as Daood Gilani. Yesterday he was monotone and monosyllabic as he admitted to plotting terror, replying to each sensational charge with a terse and quiet, "Yes, your honour," or, "That's correct, sir."
Wearing an orange jumpsuit and with his arms folded behind his back, Mr. Headley agreed that he "sought to present himself as an American who was neither Muslim nor Pakistani" to further several sprawling conspiracies.
He did not elaborate on his motivation. Mr. Headley has, in fact, been co-operating with U.S. agents since his October arrest at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, when he was caught with 13 surveillance videos he had recently made, as well as a book titled How to Pray Like a Jew.
Following a 1998 conviction for importing heroin he served 15 months in prison, receiving an unusually short sentence in return for working undercover for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.
Today Mr. Headley is once again co-operating with the authorities in an effort to receive the best possible deal. He admits he has been a terrorist, or at least a sympathizer, since at least 2003, when he first attended a Pakistan training camp. After that, he began crisscrossing the world to further his schemes, all while living in the United States.
From his base in Chicago, he plotted the deaths of dozens of Indian nationals and the half-dozen Americans killed in the Mumbai massacre. He has also implicated a lifelong friend in his crimes.
Tahawwur Hussain Rana is a Pakistani-Canadian immigration consultant slated to go on trial later this year. Both men attended a Pakistani military school together in their teens, before being separately arrested in Chicago last October. Now, Mr. Rana faces the prospect of his former friend testifying that they jointly set up foreign consultancies as fronts masking surveillance activities to prepare for terrorist attacks.
Within days of the Mumbai massacre, Mr. Headley ventured to Denmark, posing as an immigration consultant as he visited the offices of a newspaper that had published inflammatory cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.
Lashkar commanders, with the backing of al-Qaeda leaders, held all Danes responsible for the cartoons, according to the plea agreement. One key al-Qaeda-linked Pakistani terrorist even told Mr. Headley that "the attackers should behead captives and throw their heads out of the newspaper building."
Mr. Headley asserts his 2009 visits to Copenhagen were actually reconnaissance missions disguised by bogus consultant credentials obtained from Mr. Rana. The Denmark modus operandi mirrors that used in the runup to the Mumbai Massacre, when Mr. Headley made five lengthy visits to India while posing as a consultant for Mr. Rana's agency.
In past hearings, Mr. Rana's attorneys have suggested their client was an unwitting dupe who had no specific foreknowledge of any terrorist attacks.
Mr. Headley disagrees. When he returned to Chicago six months before the Mumbai attacks he "related to Rana the landing areas" where Pakistani terrorists would storm the city via its harbour, according to the plea agreement. It adds that the "defendant advised Rana that the attack plans were being delayed, in part, to wait for calmer waters."
Mr. Headley was apparently in Pakistan when the Mumbai massacre occurred, and met Lashkar leaders the same month to plot the Denmark attack.
Given his long-standing ties to the organization, he would have key - even unique - insights about its commanders, whom he said he frequently met face-to-face. His plea agreement, forged to spare him from lethal injection, is contingent on full co-operation with U.S. officials.
Some of his admissions, however, are sensitive and will likely never be heard in any court. For example, a key question is how much backing Lashkar gets from Pakistan's government and military, and how high those ties go. Like the Taliban in Afghanistan, Lashkar's militias in Kashmir are viewed by some Pakistani generals as useful tools through which to create buffer zones with India, without provoking an overt armed military conflict.
During the days after the Headley-Rana arrests, U.S. intelligence officials were given some uncorroborated tips linking Pakistani military officials to the conspiracy. In recent months, however, concerns about rogue Pakistani officials seem to have abated somewhat, with Islamabad and Washington co-operating more closely to kill and capture al-Qaeda figures in the country's lawless tribal regions.